Director Interviews
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Peter Byck, Carbon Nation
Hope is easy to sell, but fear is easier. Billing itself as a “climate change solutions” movie, Peter Byck’s Carbon Nation doesn’t want you to panic. If fear of the consequences of climate change has been the primary emotional content associated with the slew of climate-themed docs that have found their way to screens in the wake of An Inconvenient Truth, Carbon Nation dwells more on the possibilities that technological innovation, communitarian initiative and an end to political gridlock could have on our world. Time is short, but in Byck’s telling, the means to stymie the long-term catastrophes associated with […]
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GREGG ARAKI, “KABOOM”
One of the key figures in the New Queer Cinema and ever youthful at 51 years of age, Gregg Araki is a director who is increasingly hard to pigeonhole. After the critical success of 2004’s Mysterious Skin, the film which confirmed that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a movie-star and that Mr. Araki could direct delicate drama as well as exploitation and cult cinema, it seemed that the director of such indie LGBT classics as The Living End (1992) and The Doom Generation (1995) was moving on to a new, more conventionally respectable, middle-aged portion of his career. Now Mr. Araki is […]
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HANS PETER MOLAND, “A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN”
In Hans Peter Moland’s glumly humorous, sneakily moving Norwegian dramedy A Somewhat Gentle Man, a graying, ponytailed ex-con named Ulrik, played with droll aplomb by the always reliable Stellan Skarsgard, fumbles his way back into civilian life after 12 years in prison for manslaughter. He finds a job as a mechanic for a body shop owner (Bjorn Sundquist), who insists he be on time and stay away from oddly alluring office secretary Merete (Jannike Kruse). After finding a room in the basement of an aging, horny matron (a terrific Jorun Kjellsby), the sister of Ulrik’s former boss and petty crime […]
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Duane Baughman, Bhutto
Benazir Bhutto, the two time Pakistani prime minister who in 2007 was assassinated just days after she returned from military imposed exile in Dubai to once again attempt to take control of the country, was the countries’ most significant civilian political figure of her generation. Using the tragic life and times of the Muslim world’s most dynamic and successful female politician as a lens through which to capture the larger political machinations and social upheaval that has led to the sixty-seven year old Pakistani state constantly being handed back and forth between an imperiled civilian government and a conservative military establishment, […]
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CHARLES BURNETT, “KILLER OF SHEEP”
Originally published in the Spring 2007 issue of Filmmaker. Killer of Sheep plays this week as part of the Milestone Films 20th Anniversary series at the IFC Center. “When I stumbled across a 16mm print of Killer of Sheep at film school in North Carolina, it was like finding gold. I had never seen an American film quite like it…raw, honest simplicity that left me sitting there in an excited silence. It echoed throughout George Washington, the first film that David Gordon Green and I made together.” — Tim Orr, cinematographer (All the Real Girls, Raising Victor Vargas) What sort […]
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“Starting With an Idea is Fake. It’s a Dead Form”: Claire Denis on White Material
Plenty of associations come to mind when one thinks of a Claire Denis film; the French auteur’s work is intelligent, nuanced, and frankly, often slow. Denis approaches her films like a sculptor, beginning with the giant block of matter that is a life (or lives) and whittling the irrelevant away until she finds a character’s essence. So it comes as something a surprise that the final act of Denis’ latest, White Material, plays out as something of a suspense thriller; Denis has worked in genre filmmaking before (notably Trouble Every Day), but typically inverts and eschews genre convention. However, while […]
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DAMIEN CHAZELLE, “GUY & MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH”
Damien Chazelle’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is a throw back and perhaps a harbinger of things to come, a bebop tinged DIY mumblemusical that, despite its New Wavesque 16mm B&W aesthetic, is very much a movie of this time and moment. It concerns a relatively young, black and talented trumpet player named Guy and his would be, perhaps still his lover, a white grad student named Madeline (the oddly alluring Desiree Garcia). Played by real life Boston jazz scene leading light Jason Palmer, Guy engages in a series of pseudo-romances, bemoans the marginality of the relatively esoteric Jazz […]
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FREDERICK WISEMAN, “BOXING GYM”
This year the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Department launched a year long retrospective of a prominent octogenarian documentarian. On opening night of the series, with the filmmaker present, the curator of the series asked during a Q&A, “do you think you’ve mellowed a bit with age?” Frederick Wiseman responded, “why does one have to mellow?” In fact, at eighty, he hasn’t at all. Yes his films have grown a touch more lyrical and perhaps one could even say tender as he enters his sixth decade as our country and perhaps the world’s most vital documentarian. Since bursting on the […]
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SIMON RUMLEY, “RED WHITE & BLUE”
Lurking about the less reputable precincts of Texas’ capital, Erica (a terrific Amanda Fuller) at first seems like another aimless, sexually adventurous young woman who in the city that embraced mumblecore would find herself in a pedestrian drama of mid twenties malaise. Living for free in a dusty co-op, she trolls the seedy side of Austin, scoring a new suitor every night for a bout of casual, unprotected sex. Clad in denim cut-offs and white cowboy boots, she drifts through days and nights with an anomie that is only enhanced by the arty, elliptical rhythms of Veteran UK helmer Simon […]
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Rob Epstein And Jeffrey Friedman, Howl
How do you make a narrative film about a long, difficult poem? Jean Cocteau’s legendary Blood of the Poet gives it a go I suppose, but its style departs from the conventions of narrative very early on for something more willfully avant-garde. Poetry just doesn’t lend itself to shot reverse shot and one hundred and eighty degree director’s lines. This clearly difficult task didn’t daunt veteran documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, however; they took up the challenge as they made the jump to narrative in Howl, a thoughtful meditation on the early life and seminal work of Allen Ginsberg. […]
